UiPath Community 20.4 Stable Release

UiPath Community 20.4 Stable Release

Update - 20.4 Stable Release is now live

Studio

UiPath Studio 20.4 delivers major new capabilities and usability improvements including governance support to deploy the same code conventions to all your Studio instances; selector repository, to build, save, reuse and update your processes when enterprise applications require upgrade; find file and selector references when it’s hard to pinpoint usages. And many more.

In addition, Studio welcomes StudioX in the Enterprise family, soon to be out of our Preview incubator.

Finally, we are introducing RPA testing and Application Testing capabilities, both part of our Studio Pro newest type of license / offering. As always, our Community will benefit from the entire feature set as we will keep our top Studio Pro offering on par with Studio Community license.

As we are gradually rolling out Studio 20.4, we are also updating the Community licenses so that everyone has access to all the Studio features. In the interim, some might find that some features like testing capabilities below are not yet available. As a result, if you are connected to Orchestrator Community:

  • disconnect from Orchestrator
  • license locally with Community
  • check “Stand-alone license” under your Orchestrator robot settings
  • reconnect to Orchestrator

Governance

In conversations with customers, Governance was the first question every enterprise asked about when it came to deploy common best practices and code conventions around building scalable automation. As such, in the first version of Governance we aimed at supporting definition control for:

  • package feed management
  • workflow analyzer rules
  • Studio backstage settings

To define a policy, it’s as easy as creating the perfect Studio configuration on your machine and then just export and deploy via Windows Group Policy. More details here.

Object Browser

Object Browser is an initiative which relates to the management, re-usability and reliability of UI element identification frameworks and derivatives. It aims at solving 2 essential issues:

  • reusability of UI descriptors (be they selectors, CV descriptors or Unified Target descriptors)
  • update automation processes when automated applications need upgrade

UI Descriptors (Selector, Computer Vision, Unified Target) can now be extracted from your process activities into a structured schema which groups them by Application, Screens and UI Elements.

Once extracted, you can choose to keep them inside the process which makes UI Descriptors reusable at process level. Or you can also choose to publish them as UI Libraries.

UI Libraries can be added and used as dependencies to your processes. This gives reusability of UI Descriptors at a global automation pool level.

Planning to upgrade from Application V1 to Application V2 and you fear your automation processes might break? Just make sure you have your UI Descriptors for V2 ready, publish them as a UI Library and update your process references to use the new selectors.

Want to learn more? Read here.

Find References

With almost any type of coding, developers put a lot of effort into searching for variables, arguments, files, dependencies and their usage/references. At UiPath we understand this need and we started with some shy steps in offering full support. In 20.4, you can search for file references or selector references. With subsequent releases we plan to rollout the same for variables, arguments, activity types, packages and imports.

Testing Capabilities

Version 20.4 of UiPath Studio brings broad Testing Capabilities into your automation platform. Enterprise level automation does not only need automation for RPA, but also the Capability to test your RPA and the applications you use in your company. Therefore, we added “Application Testing” and “RPA Testing”, including “Mobile Automation” (for which we’ll follow up with a separate blog post) so you can cover all testing aspects in your company. Note: These capabilities are only available in Community and in the new Studio Pro Enterprise license which is now in Limited Availability.

To run those Test Cases at scale, we have made those capabilities available also on Orchestrator.
Learn more here:

How to enable Studio Pro capabilities

As we are gradually rolling out Studio 20.4, we are also updating the Community licenses so that everyone has access to all the Studio features. In the interim, some might find that some features like testing capabilities below are not yet available. As a result, if you are connected to Orchestrator Community:

Note about a known bug: your Open Recent project will not display your previous entries due to the technical mishap; the list is not lost and can be accessed by browsing this setting file: %localappdata%\UiPath\UiStudio.v2.settings

Application Testing

Test Automation Project

Test your applications easily with our “Test Automation” projects, no matter if for in-house agile teams, long term developed legacy applications or 3rd party tools that you created customization for.


Figure 1: New Project Type “Test Automation” for all application testing needs.

Test Cases

To easier differentiate between RPA Workflows and Workflows meant for testing, we introduce a new type “Test Case” ( image ), that can easily be added like any other item. Each Test Case can also be separately executed on Orchestrator, that is enhanced with testing capabilities as well.

Note: The latest Orchestrator version will ship to Community separately, later this month.

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Figure 2: Create New Test Case task.

Figure 3: Structure Test Cases as you see fit in your project.

You can also select multiple Test cases to run them as a set locally to debug them.

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Test Case States

We wanted to make sure you can decide which Test cases are ready to be published, and which ones are still a Draft, as they are ongoing work. Therefore, the states “Draft” or “Publishable” let you decide which ones are send to Orchestrator on your next Publish, or which ones still need time to work on.

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Figure 4: Set as Publishable or to Draft

Data Driven Test Cases

Of course, no automated testing solution is complete without the support to run your Test cases in different data variations, e.g. running a Test case that creates a product easily with different types of products.
In this first version you can create Data Driven Test Cases ( tiny) the same way you create Test cases and then bind them to an Excel. Arguments will be automatically created, and the variations are stored within your Studio Pro Test Automation Project for reuse and so it is versioned with the Versioning system of your choice.

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A wizard will guide you through the import and/or selection of an Excel Worksheet, create arguments for you and import the data to your project.

Not only can those Variations be executed on Orchestrator from the same Test case, you can also select which ones to run locally in a specialized Debug-Task.

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Figure 5: select variations to execute for “Run” or “Debugging”.

RPA Testing

With a previously unseen feature on the RPA market, you now also have the option, in addition to testing your applications, to test your RPA Workflows directly, by using our so called ‘RPA Testing’ feature set. Not only can you easily create Test cases for your RPA Workflows with a few clicks, you will also see the Activity Coverage, meaning the degree of Activities from your Workflows tested by your Test cases, see directly while debugging your Test cases.

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Figure 6: Show the Activity Coverage directly in your Workflow.

Simply select any Workflow file and click “Create Test case” in the Context menu. Not only will it create a Test case, but it will wrap the Workflow and import all arguments too.

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Figure 7: Generate Test cases for your Workflows with a simple Click.

The BDD ( Behavior Driven Development ) based created “Given – When – Then” structure allows for preparation/initialization steps in the Given section, calls the Workflow in the When section and allows for easy Verification in the Then section with our new “Testing Activity Pack” shown in the following section.

Verification Activities

No Test case is complete without some Verification, Assertion or Check, as you would never know if the test where successful.

To make those Verifications as easy as possible, you can use 3 Verification Activities from our Testing Activity Pack. Those 3 options should cover the main needs for Verification in any Test case.

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Figure 8: Verification Activities as part of the UiPath Testing Activitiy Pack.

Verify Control Attribute

Directly use another Activity from a UI-Automation or a NonUI-Automation to easily verify a property returned from that nested Activity:

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Figure 9: Verify an attribute from an existing Activity.

Verify Expression

For more advanced users and cases where the values need to be buffered first, transformed, truncated and so on, we have a generic Verification Activity, where you can use any Expression that returns true or false:

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Figure 10: Verify an Expression is true or false.

Verify Expression with Operator

To make it easy to compare 2 values with an operator, we introduced an extension of ‘Verify Expression’ to let you compare 2 values with different operators:

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Continuous Improvements

Constantly improving and polishing existing capabilities based on feedback from our users is one key focus for our Studio team. Below just a handful of these examples.

General Usability Improvements

  • Splash Screen Source Control Configuration : If you don’t use all SVN, TFS and Git at the same time then there’s no point in loading them all every time you open Studio. This gives a Studio startup performance improvement.
  • Variable/Argument Creation Shortcuts default to String: we’ve heard you about ability to choose the type when using CTRL+K or CTRL+M and not to default to GenericValue. For now, we’ve changed the default to String.
  • Copy Paste It: Copy-Paste context menus for panels input search, copy paste context for Orchestrator resources, copy paste (or drag and drop) from windows explorer to Studio, copy paste multiple files and more. Tried covering most of them just to make your life easier. If we missed any, let us know.
  • Remove unused namespaces and Import Namespaces
  • Streamlined package install: remember user’s choice if she accepted the package terms and conditions.
  • Auto-upgrade NuGet downgrades : When a nuget downgrade occurs, prompt the user to upgrade his reference.

Source Control Improvements

  • Add to source control Project Panel contextual menu to aid adding to source control even quicker.
  • Multiple Git fixes and improvements : Git support for Windows Proxy, Git Manage Remote Repositories, Git Authentication with token support.
  • Improved usability for browsing for projects under source control

Command Palette Improvements

  • Activities Prioritized by Scope : when using Command Palette plus sign, activities will be ordered based on current scope. If you are adding within a Unified Target screen scope, activities specific to this scope will be surfaced first. The API needed to integrate with this is also available for custom activities.
  • Plus sign support : ability to add activities contextually was extended to other scopes too, such as CV Scope.

Expression / Code Editor Improvements

  • Code Editor-like line formatting and numbering support even for Expression editor.
  • Auto-create variable name from selected text in expression, because sometimes that part of text is exactly the name you wanted for your variable.
  • Expression / Code Editor search floating panel. Just hit CTRL+F while inside Code/Expression Editor.
  • Expression Editor shortcut and contextual menu option (Ctrl+Shift+E) to not have to go to Properties Panel in order to open expression editor. Just open it right there from the canvas/designer.

Debugging Improvements

  • Configurable Run Debug Options. Go to Settings and choose what your “Run/Debug” ribbon button does by default.
  • Continue on Exception, check this if you want to ignore exceptions you already know will be fired.
  • Show Execution Trail, check this flag and each activity execution will leave a trail of succeeded / failed.

New Workflow Analyzer Rules

  • ST-USG-014 - Detect Restrictions. Use it for restricting usage for some activity packages.
  • ST-USG-025 – Activities Restrictions. Use it for restricting usage for some particular activities.
  • More rules implemented via activities packages. Please read below.

StudioX

The 20.4 release removes the “Preview” label from StudioX, it’s now being made available as a generally available part of the product with the same quality and support we offer for the Studio profile. A lot has changed since the first public preview in our 19.10 fall release.

Note About Upgrading Projects Created with Versions Prior to 20.4

It’s important to note that all versions of StudioX prior to 20.4 were for Preview purposes only. As such, in our efforts to react to feedback and build a quality product we unfortunately were not able to maintain backward compatibility with older projects. The smoothest path forward will be to rebuild your automation projects using 20.4. Since 20.4 removes the preview label, we will guarantee backward compatibility of projects created using 20.4 with future updates to StudioX.

StudioX Activities

We’ve expanded the set of activities included with StudioX and made them easier to use.

  • We updated the names of our activities to better reflect how a user works. For example, when working with an Excel file, we renamed the activity from “Excel File Card” to “Use Excel File”.

  • You can now name the variable used for accessing the current iteration in all the “For Each” activities.

  • You can find use downloaded files when downloading from an application (Desktop or Web)

  • You can securely save and use usernames and passwords in your automations using the “Get Username/Password” activity. Credentials are securely stored in your Windows Credential manager, meaning you can’t accidentally give someone else your usernames and passwords if you share your project. If they are not found when the automation runs, you will simply be prompted to enter them with the option to securely remember them. If they are found, the credential dialog will briefly appear to give you the opportunity to update credentials if needed, but automatically submit if you don’t interact with it.

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  • We brought the same support you have for working with Word files available in Studio to StudioX. To use these activities, start with the “Use Word File” activity and place your desired actions inside.

  • We added significant capabilities to our UI automation capabilities. These include a Recorder for recording UI automation interactions with Desktop and Web applications, and the ability to launch desktop applications with specific arguments (e.g. enables you to open a specific PDF file). See for more details.

Excel Automation

  • When working with files that are only known at runtime (e.g. downloaded or loaded from a “For Each File in Folder”) or file types other than .xlsx, you can specify a .xlsx “template file” to enhance your editing experience. Save a copy of a file that represents the structure of the file at runtime (e.g. same sheets, tables, and columns with some sample data) to have an interactive editing experience. Note: UiPath supports using any supported Excel file type at runtime, this limitation only applies to the interactive editing experience

  • When writing to an Excel sheet inside a loop, you can now automatically write to the next row for each iteration by checking the “Autoincrement row” checkbox on the “Write Cell” activity. This works regardless of the type of loop which contains the activity (Repeat, Excel For Each Row, For Each Email, For Each File in Folder).

Email Automation

  • You can now create HTML email bodies when sending emails through Outlook. This enables you to insert Excel tables, pictures, use different fonts and colors, among many other formatting capabilities. To send an HTML email, create the body of the email in a Word document, choose the “Document” option for the “Body” property, and select the document you want to use for the email body.
  • When processing emails using a “For Each Email Message” activity, you can now choose filters for which mails to be selected. Options include the ability to limit the maximum number of emails you want to process (0 currently means ‘No Limit’), and to filter only Unread emails. You can also filter by BCC, CC, Date, From, and To values using the “Additional Filters” button.
  • You can now create and send calendar invites.

Governance

Because StudioX shares a common core with Studio, they share many of the same capabilities. This includes the ability to deploy governance policies that ensure users are following organizational guidelines for quality and automations. For more details see the Governance documentation

It’s also important for organizations to have an insight into what their business users are doing. The activities used by StudioX users automatically log the following information into the robot logs (where are sent to Orchestrator if the robot is connected) that record

  • When the robot interacts with a Desktop application (records the name) or website (records the URL) including when data is scraped.
  • What resource is used (Excel or Word file, or an Outlook account)
  • When emails are created (sent, reply, forward) including the To and Cc fields, and whether it was saved as a draft or sent.
  • Each Process Started event in the log contains a property indicating what started the automation (Studio, StudioX, UiPath Assistant, or Orchestrator) so you can build reports and gain insights into how your users are using the product (e.g. they created the automation in StudioX and are now regularly running it from UiPath Assistant)

Getting started experience

We have added several templates available directly on the Start screen. These are fully functional workflows annotated with description of all the actions used. They are a great way to learn how to accomplish common tasks in StudioX and easy to reconfigure to serve your specific purposes.

On top of the Templates, you now have a lot more Common scenarios to help you further build your automations. These are context aware, so you will find the most relevant scenarios first in the search. For example, if you are working inside an Use Outlook Account activity, you will see first the Common scenarios related to email processing.

UiPath Assistant (formerly Agent Desktop)

In the last 6 months we launched, renamed and constantly improved the new face of Attended Automation. And this is just the first version of the UiPath Assistant. In the future we plan to bring all the relevant UiPath products into one single umbrella. We want it to be the one stop RPA shop for business users. Until then, we have the following features:

Improved UI & UX

We changed the face of the old Robot tray in order to feel more modern and to be easier to use. We are proud of the result and we really hope you like it too.

Picture in Picture (Experimental)


Although Experimental, probably one of the best features of this release: Picture in Picture :tv: allows you to run Attended processes completely isolated while you are continuing your own work :rocket: . You can even peek on what the Robot does with the Picture in Picture window.

Favorite Processes

In the new UiPath Assistant you can easily pin to top the processes you use repeatedly.

Tip: after you select your favorite processes, right click on the UiPath Assistant icon in the taskbar.

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Reminders

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If you have processes that you have to run regularly, you now have the Reminders feature that can help you run the processes when you need it. You can schedule a reminder daily, weekly or monthly.

Filter processes based on folder

Starting with this version, you can now filter your processes based on the Orchestrator folder they come from. If you have processes that come from more than one folder, a workspace dropdown will be shown, and you can choose to see processes coming from only one folder. This will come handy when using Personal Workspaces.

UI Automation

UI Automation Next Package

The new UI automation framework UI Automation Next, now in preview, brings quite a few changes, including no less than a paradigm shift in the way targets are identified, configured, and verified. It’s a shift towards a more WYSIWYG way of working, by directly interacting with the automated application and the way robots “see” the interface.

Under the hood, UI Automation Next uses all the available technologies for locating elements: the trustworthy selectors you are familiar with, along with images, texts, and soon ComputerVision . All these wrapped in an anchor-based algorithm.

We feel this update takes us one step closer to the promise of no-code, reliable automations accessible to everybody.

New Features

New element selection mode

We have completely overhauled the way in which you indicate targets, using an anchor-based approach, that some of you might recognize from ComputerVision . The new selection mode offers more flexibility by letting you select, inspect, and clear the target, and add multiple anchors; all in one go.

Editing advanced settings is now also performed in-place, allowing the selector, image, and text detection methods to be edited straight from the Selection Helper window.

Verifying the selection

This important step has been closely fused with the editing experience: when editing an element, the runtime algorithm – the one used by the robot to find that specific element – is also used to verify in real-time that your configuration works as expected, and the results are highlighted on the live app.

Recorder

UI Automation Next also comes with its own brand-new recorder, that follows the same principle: fusing all the previously available technologies into a single, easy to use interface.

All recorded steps are available at a glance, during the recording, and they can be edited or removed.

All this, starting with 20.4, available in Studio and StudioX.

UI Automation Activities Package

New Microsoft Edge (Chromium) browser support

Microsoft launched thehew Chromium based browser, called simply Edge. We follow on and we release the UI automation support for the web applications opened with the new Edge!

All you need to do is to install the new UiPath extension available in Studio and SetupExtensions tool, tailored for your needs/permitted administrative rights.

Selector case sensitiveness support

Case sensitiveness support is out the door! Now, you can build selectors that are case-insensitive. Starting with this release, it can be easily achieved by adding a new attribute. More about this feature, here.

Java and SAP selectors

The support was improved and is even more reliable. You can now use fuzziness and ReGex support for these selector types, as well.

Working with disabled UI elements

There are cases when working with disabled elements brings automation design speed and comfort. Like inserting a date into a read only date field attached to a Calendar widget. Working with disabled UI elements is now more transparent for the user and the feature can be switched on/off at the project/activity level. Details here.

New UIA Workflow Analyzer Rule: UI-SEC-010 App/Url restrictions

It permits setting up a list of allowed or prohibited applications and URLs for the automation.

UIA Worflow Analyzer Rules note: if you are upgrading from 19.12 preview release and want to use workflow analyzer rules coming from the UIAutomation package make sure you clean up the folder located in your %localappdata%\UiPath\Rules.

Support for VMware Technologies

VMware technologies join the family of virtualization technologies we support in Studio. You can create automation processes for VMware Horizon applications and desktops. Simply follow these configuration steps and you’re ready for VMware automation.

SAP UIAutomation Activities

We’re constantly working on bringing you the best SAP automation experience. Hence, various improvements were made regarding SAP WinGUI automation, the supported SAP elements, and what configurations need to be performed for a tailored SAP automation experience.

Several new SAP-specific activities are now delivered with the UIAutomation package. They enable you to build accurate selectors for SAP controls, extract data, and perform click actions. They are as follows:

  • SAP Login allows you to login to SAP without creating complex UI Automation logic. Just drag it on the canvas, configure it and enjoy easy automation!

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  • SAP Logon - easily configure which SAP logon application you want your automation use and which connection name

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  • SAP Call Transaction - use it to fire an SAP transaction. So easy and fun!

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  • Select Menu Item - allows you to select a menu Item from the main SAP WinGUI window

    sap select menu item

  • Select Dates in Calendar - allows you to select single dates or periods of time

    sap select dates in calendar

  • Read Statusbar - reads the message displayed in the Statusbar on the bottom of the SAP WinGUI window

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  • Click Toolbar Button - allows you to click a button from the SAP system or application toolbars

    sap click toolbar button

  • Click Picture on Screen - allows you to click a picture displayed on a SAP WinGUI screen

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You can now click/double click and read text from SAP Trees separate elements in columns

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ExportUITree Activity

  • Applications change UIs every day. And you want to understand what attributes changed exactly and how it impacts your workflows. With the ExportUiTree activity, you can capture the UI tree details (children UI elements, attributes and their values) of a specified UI node, before and after application update, to compare them and decide based on the differences.

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InvokeActiveX Activity

  • InvokeActiveX activity can be used to call specific ActiveX COM methods to interact with an ActiveX UI element.

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UseForeground Activity

Until today, processes were either Background or Foreground, without any ways to transition between the scopes. For a lot of scenarios, a process requires Foreground access only for a limited amount of time. One example may be processes that do OCR in the background and whenever a text cannot be identified it brings the Validation Station into focus. For this kind of processes, we should allow processes to transition between Foreground and Background.
Coming in 20.4 is the Use Foreground scope activity, that will enable a process to switch into Foreground just for the time it needs. You will be able to keep the process running as a Background one while doing API work, thus enabling parallel execution. When UI interaction is required, you can use the Use Foreground activity to mark your process as the one using the UI. We guarantee that only one process at a time will consume the Foreground.
If more than one process is requesting access to the Foreground, the processes will be queued in the order of the requests. You can set up a timeout value (WaitForForeground) that would represent the maximum amount of time the process should wait to get access to the UI.

Note: this activity is relevant just for Attended Robots. For Unattended Robots, using this will have no effect.

Known Issue: if you use browser UIAutomation activities directly inside an Use Foreground activity, the selector will be created partial and the process will fail. Example: Add a Click activity, that clicks a button in a webpage, directly inside Use Foreground activity.
Workaround: encapsulate the UIAutomation activities inside an Open or Attach Browser activity.

Breaking Changes

The title attribute is no longer exposed in selectors for editable text controls (such as forms). Consider using the text attribute instead when generating selectors.

Other

You can now generate more accurate top-level selectors for tooltips, popups, and dropdown menus.

Computer Vision Activities

Cell and Table support

Performing automations in tables from applications hosted inside a remote connection was complex and unreliable but it’s all made easier with the new cell support . You can now detect tables and cells in the apps you’re automating. You can also interact with individual cells by specifying anchors contained inside the table.

TableScreenshot

Validate Children

A new option Validate children has been added to the CV Screen Scope. The function will analyse CV activities inside the scope and let the user know if the elements that the activity tries to interact with are detected on their respective screen.

CV Drop Down Select

Since we know drop-down menus are very often used in automation, we have created a new activity, CV Dropdown Select, which helps you easily operate any drop-downs you might come across in your automation journey.

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Telling the status of check boxes can be a difficult proposition. For this purpose we have added the new CV Check activity that includes actions like Check , Uncheck and Toggle

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Also, we’ve performed several UI changes, with the constant goal of enhancing the user experience.

Activities

System

Multiple Entry Points

For the InvokeProcess and RunParallelProcces , we added the capability to start a process from a different workflow than Main. You will be able to decide, in the parent process, what will be the XAML that the child process will execute first.

Download File activity

You can now start a download and have the workflow wait for it to finish before providing you with the file information. It’s not just browsers, you can trigger the download from any application (maybe an SQL client exporting a database dump or whatever else you want).

download_file_demo

Orchestrator Storage activities

Since we will now have BLOB storage capabilities in Orchestrator, automations can take advantage of this feature to store large files in this repository and easily share them among processes.

We have added a handful of activities that facilitate the use of this feature: uploading and downloading files, deleting files, reading and writing text files, all using the BLOB storage server included in a compatible verion of Orchestrator.

Break and Continue now work in While and Do While

A very requested feature is now available: you can Break your While/Do While loops and you can Continue to the next cycle in each of these activities.

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New versions of the While and Do While activities are now available and they allow Break and Continue activities in their body.

Create File activity designer

The Create File activity gets a much needed designer to fit in with its fellow filesystem activities and make it easier to use it.

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Mobile Device Automation

No automation platform can be complete without an automation solution for Mobile Devices, as they already make up more then 50% of the daily usage of applications. With 20.4 we proudly present our new Mobile Device Automation platform, supporting ~98% of Smartphones or smart devices currently on the market, not matter if Emulators, real devices, or if they are in your local network, connected via USB or in the Cloud, by leveraging appium.io.

Not only can you design and run automation on your Devices, you can also do this completely from your Desktop, without ever touching the Device , with the new Mobile Device Manager:

The created Workflows look and feel like the Workflows you already know how to create for Desktop Automation. We made it our mission to make it as easy and seamless to use as possible, so you don’t need to learn something new and you can apply the same concepts from Desktop on Mobile:

Figure 11: Automated Mobile App Workflow

With only one nuget-package you get all that you need, the Mobile Device Manager, a set of Mobile Automation Activities and the ability to connect and design/run automation on Mobile Devices connected through an Appium Server. An existing Appium Server is a prerequisite, it is not delivered or started with our product in the current version.

A set of new Activities mirror all the Actions available on the Mobile Device Manager to interact with your Device:

Figure 12: Activities for Mobile Automation

A brand-new recorder for Mobile Interactions let’s you import your own interactions on the Mobile Device as Activities in a Workflow with a single Click:

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We will follow-up with more details in a separate post, showing you how to set it up and use all the exciting new features.

See here for a guide on how to install and use this new feature:

Diagnostic Tool

The former DiagTool has been transformed into the Diagnostic Tool with a more user-friendly UI and a number of data collectors. Search for the UiPath Diagnostic Tool in the Studio install location.

Now, you can select from predefined lists of collectors, depending on which information you want to gather. If you wish to collect logs pertaining to Studio, use the appropriate profile.

You can collect data such as Registry information, Event logs, Computer information, Installations, Settings File, or Orchestrator Web Config, Orchestrator Application Host File and many more. Add whichever data collector you think is appropriate and exclude the ones that gather information you might not be comfortable with sharing.

How does this help you? If you’re an Enterprise user, you can collect and send data our technical support team much easier, thus providing them with more information for solving your problem.

If you’re a Community user, collected logs and data may be helpful when reporting issues via our Send Feedback form inside Studio. The more information you can send us, the higher the chances to identify the problem quickly.

Document Understanding

:fireworks: :loudspeaker: :sparkler: We are happy to announce that we have released a beta version of the IntelligentOCR package that allows you to create smooth human-robot communication when it comes to Document Processing.
Learn more here:

Orchestrator

:female_detective: Pst! May I interest you in some Orchestrator?

So, we were up to quite a lot lately. A lot. We reduced the configuration effort of unattended setups, we re-branded our Tasks feature, added built-in support for blob storage. Introduced personal workspaces for all Studio users out-there (we see you, yes we do). Plus a couple of other very-cool-really-not-bragging things. You can have fun with all of these on https://platform.uipath.com/. Here’s what you need to know:

Modern Folders Unattended Setup

In 2019.10 and 2018.3 we brought to you a couple of features to help decrease the deployment effort of attended environments in Orchestrator. We’re talking about robot auto-provisioning, floating robots and machine templates. We now fully brought our solution to maturity, by turning our attention to our unattended offering.
Features previously available in attended scenarios only, are now valid for unattended as well.

  • Machine templates take over the necessity of defining a cartesian product between the sets of users and machines, in the sense that an environment with 8 users and 8 VDIs needs a configuration with one machine template and 8 robots, instead of creating 64 robots for each possible combination between the two 8-sets.
  • Add robot auto-provisioning to that and do the math. 8 users with automatic robot creation enabled, one machine template and that’s your setup. Attach the users and machine template to whatever modern folder has the processes to be executed, and you are good to go.

I would say it’s easy breezy, but you might find it difficult at first. Just give it a try, it’s truly awesome.

Action Center

The Tasks feature has been treated to a major overhaul. It is now called Action Center, with actions instead of tasks working as the operational units of the center. Don’t worry, the functionality itself stays the same. Well kind of. We introduced a new type of action, and guys, it is da bomb!
So, what happened is, we thought it would be a great idea to integrate Validation Station with our new re-branded Action Center, and we did it.:dart: What does it mean?

Well, to ensure no waste in terms of resources consumption while waiting for a long-running process completion, whenever user input is required in regard to reviewing and correcting document classification and automatic data extraction results, a Document Validation action is generated.
This action is to be acted upon by the user to whom it’s assigned. During the time the action is pending completion, no robot is held hostage. They can be used to execute different processes just like that.

Upon completion of the Document Validation action, the initial workflow is resumed on whatever robot is available. See here details.

Storage Buckets

Orchestrator now brings you built-in support for blob storage, using the Orchestrator database or external providers (I.e. Azure, Amazon, MinIO). These Storage Buckets are folder-scoped entities, enabling you to maintain fine-grained control over access to and use of the storage and its contents.

Personal Workspace

Make life easier for your Studio users and yourself by enabling the creation of a Personal Workspace in Orchestrator for each user. They can then publish their packages directly to this separate space, where a process is automatically created or updated, and launch their automation quickly and easily from the tray.

Jobs Priority

We’ve also added the Jobs Priority feature y’all have been waiting for. You can now better control which job has precedence over other competing jobs. Higher priority jobs get the resources first and are executed before lower priority ones. Jobs with the same priority get executed in the order they’ve been created. That’s it. Have fun!

Processes Display Name

We also made sure that, from now on, users are able to conveniently change the display name of a process. This is for all of you out-there republishing packages and recreating the processes because of a typo. We finally did it! 10/10!

Package and Workflow Compare

The Package Explorer feature got richer with compare functionalities. It now empowers you to see the actual differences between any two selected versions of a package, pointing out workflow files that were added, modified, or deleted, and highlighting changes in folders or the dependencies list. Use the filters to see what interests you the most.

As a bonus, you can view the differences between workflow files. Compare the two selected versions of the .xaml file side by side, earliest file version on the left, with deleted content highlighted in red, modified content in yellow, and added content in green.

Chatbot connector - Now in Public Preview!

Introducing the UiPath Chatbot Connector

The UiPath chatbot connector provides a no-code configuration experience to map intents to processes in UiPath Orchestrator, enabling you to automate fulfilment of customer requests

In this version of the preview, map intents from NLP agents defined in Google Dialogflow to processes in UiPath Cloud Orchestrator to automate fulfilment. Make your chatbots available internally, and outside of your organization via the out-of-box Slack and Web channels

Learn more here:

Hello, does anybody read these?

Thank you for making it this far!

Please send your impressions, suggestions for improvement, bugs and complaints to us by using the Send Feedback button in Studio. image

Stay safe, stay home & automate!
UiPath Team

64 Likes

So many features… . Great addition :slight_smile:
Thank you :slight_smile: @loginerror

6 Likes

This is going to be an amazing release!! Really can’t believe how many new features it has :clap::clap:

5 Likes

Awesome stuff :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Wow… so many new features in this release. :heart_eyes: :heart_eyes:

Especially I loved the new features like RPA Testing, Mobile Automation, SAP Activities, Foreground Activity and CV Activities. Can’t wait to test these new features :star_struck: :star_struck: :star_struck:

Thank you UiPath Team for you hard work and providing great new features to us :clap: :clap: :clap:

Hey @sandeep13 bro,

Now we can use Break Activity inside While/Do While loops to break and continue with next set of activities.

17 Likes

Thats Amazing :slight_smile: So Many Features in one release. Those Testing Features are just a lit :slight_smile:

5 Likes

Wow lots of new features, update , improvements

6 Likes

Holy Guacamole this new album is hot!

Edit- wait is this an April fools joke? It’s too good to be true. Please- no bamboozles on this one.

5 Likes

There are so many great features. Extremely great!
How do I try this. I downloaded version 2020.4.0-beta.250 Community License, but I have not seen these features.
Thank you

5 Likes

This is an amazing version, with so many updates

3 Likes

Does the mobile terminal have a user manual? Or where is the explanation?

1 Like

This is Just Amazing !!!

5 Likes

Wow! newly added features help us to build robust robots.
test automation, test coverage features will improve the code quality!!
cheers @loginerror

5 Likes

Hi Uipath Team,

Really great and thank you very much for this 20.4 version this is the new features we wanted. You are included real time testing project like test cases and mobile automation really i can not believe this but many of the selenium automation testers and manual testers want to switch to uipath developer for those kind people will be very happy to utilize this tool and uipath will get more support in the future definitely. Now a days all IT companies started to look code less automation tool. As of now UiPath is being only business process automation tool but here after not like only that also test automation tool for both web and mobile app so here after no code stress simply and fast we can automate all kind of business application and testing by using this new feature of uipath. Once again thank you lot UiPath team for added test project options and mobile app test automation options .

Thanks and Regards,

Rajesh D

Automation Test Engineer

10 Likes

As always there is too much to handle at once!
I cannot wait to test out Mobile Automation.

One question, can I use UiPath Application Testing to do Load test my applications?

2 Likes

@loginerror
Thanks for the awesome updates.
All the things are really good , and i personally more interested and refers for the GOVERNANCE ,

I think its really important when we come up with the enterprise levels,
no only mentions its main and also huge area we have to cover,
i hope this will a good start for it ,
i personally like and always try to give and my feedback for it
Thank you for all :sunglasses: :star_struck: :rocket: :rocket: :rocket: :rocket:

8 Likes

Nice Updates. Testing Capabilities coming later this month? Can’t seem to find them yet in 2020.4.0-beta.250.
Object Browser and Find References Panel look fine though :slight_smile:

Cheers, Lukas

2 Likes

Hi @srdjan.suc, the main focus of the UiPath Test Suite is to support functional Application Testing and RPA Testing.
As you may know, UiPath Studio is very flexible, and you can programmatically create load tests as well, mid-term, we want to support Load Testing comprehensively either by a dedicated feature set, or a proper integration to common load testing solutions.

8 Likes

Hi Lukas!
The Testing Capabilities will be part of the new Studio Pro offering, which is a new license for Studio with advanced features. As stated above, the Community license will be from now on a Studio Pro version, so you have all the new features in there, but it just takes some time for us to migrate all the existing community licenses/users, so unfortunately nothing to do from your side besides waiting a bit.
I hope that help, sorry for any inconvenience.
Bye,
Chris

9 Likes

Hi Christian, thanks for the reply and welcome to the forum! :grin:

Please elaborate on Studio Pro! There is no documentation or resources about this. #1 google result is this antique post: Difference between Community and Studio Pro

Is this some kind of renaming from regular Studio to Studio Pro, so there is 2 products (Pro & X) or is this something new completely where we will have regular, Pro and StudioX?

I’m excited to check it out, sure I’ll wait!

4 Likes